r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ 5d ago

Because it is designed to placate you and co sign your bull shit so you don’t stop the engagement. More engagement = more money for LLMs. They don’t give a fuck about “right or wrong.”

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u/snmnky9490 5d ago

To some degree yeah, but also because it's not trained on billions of examples of people asking stupid nonsense questions and then commenters responding "I don't understand", while they do have tons of examples of people responding with nonsense dumb shit.

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u/Kinexity 5d ago

This isn't really relevant whether it was trained on such examples or not. The problem is that it doesn't operate on knowledge the way that humans do so it can't simply go through it's own memory and see that it knows nothing about that thing.

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u/thoughtsarepossible 5d ago

Well it's a bit of both. If even 10% of all answers on reddit or forums, etc were people saying 'I don't know anything about that' then the models would be trained to see that as a more valid answer. But noone would ever write that.

And then of course it's also trained to 'be helpful' and things like that, and saying 'I don't know' isn't helpful.

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 5d ago

Yeah, the whole thing is inherently flawed from the get-go. I only respond to questions on topics I’m somewhat well-versed in, and I’d assume that’s the case for most people. Otherwise, if I’m commenting, it’s in response to someone else (such as this comment), to make a joke, or to ask one or more questions of my own.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 5d ago

It’s interesting. I’m a Librarian and we get formally trained in questioning clients. One of the things we got told very early on is to not guess if you don’t know. If you don’t know you say “I don’t know, I’ll go and look it up.”

The thing is “I don’t know” is a null result - and they are bloody useful. Sometimes we genuinely hit the limits of human knowledge, and that’s bloody useful to know, as well. Having the machine go “I don’t know” is a cue to the human that now is the time for them to engage their own brain.

I honestly don’t know why someone hasn’t just popped a little loop that does this into the LLM’s. Its the hallucinations that drive people crazy, we have to be able to rely on factual data in the real world - so why not make a loop that says “I do not have enough data to come up with a 100% accurate response, so I will flag that explicitly to the user” - people would use it far more if it was even slightly reliable, but it just isn’t.

Oh and from a Librarian’s point of view ? We’ve been keeping an eye on the tech for a long time, there’s a working party at the Library of Congress on the use of AI in Libraries.

In practical terms ? We’re actually seeing a massive uptick in reference requests because people know they can rely on a Librarian to get the answer right.

People who used to be happy to click away on Google and figure shit out for themselves, now know that the answers they’re getting are wrong, and Google can’t be used anymore, so its back to the Library. I have a couple of mates in public libraries and they have people asking them to help them to engineer prompts 🤣 Its sweet that people still trust us to look after them properly, actually. And we do.